The Speckled Monster (24 page)

When this astonishing report had reached the Boston papers in mid-November 1720, the public, as he expected, paled and went green.
Disgusting,
grunted the men;
horrible,
shuddered the women. But many more of his neighbors than Dr. Boylston would have guessed took deep breaths and firmly settled their stomachs. Captain Winslow and his wife were well liked; their adoration for each other was legendary, and they had three children to think of too. Besides, at the time she had been just thirty-six, not young, perhaps, but too young to die of an old woman's disease. For Sarah Winslow, the operation had meant the chance to watch her children grow up, to scent several more seasons of apple pies baking, to lie in bed next to her sleeping husband and watch the moon wax and wane out the window. On consideration, people nodded to one another, they had to agree: better to have one's breast cut off than to paste the spreading sore with strong (but not strong enough) smelling ointments and drink opium until one died, chased in circles by nightmares and pain.

Daring,
said his admirers.
Courageous and kind. The man you'd want by if it was your wife ill. Your husband, or your child.

Dangerous,
hissed his detractors.
A butcherous quack. He calls it a cure, but it might well have killed her. Who was to know?

Slowly, the jangling had died down. Dr. Boylston's patients had drifted back, while Dr. Sharp shut up shop and slipped out of town—not, as boasted, to London, but to Piscataqua, New Hampshire.

Even as this controversy was coming to a head, John Gore had sailed into the harbor to die in sight of home.

The beauty of the sea:
John would have laughed at that phrase applied to himself, but loved it, set to the sight that was stilling traffic in Dock Square. Up and down the Long Wharf, too, and all along the crescent-shaped shore from the hump of the South Battery to the coy curving tip of the North End.
Ships
.

Zabdiel sent Tommy scooting back to the shop to fetch Jack; they reappeared in a twinkling, Jack with his two-and-a-half-year-old son Jackey perched on his shoulders. The little party threaded its way down to the Town Dock, breathing in the white-winged power of the view, and jostling the others joining the impromptu fair setting up along the shore.

Tommy danced about underfoot all the while, naming as many ships as he could by the shape of hull and sail—
Friends Adventure,
Captain James;
Neptune,
Captain Langsford; and one—no—two
Sarahs,
plus Captain Pitts's
John & Sarah
to boot. And there was Captain Fletcher's
Tryal
—why would you name a ship that? Or
Prudence
? There, see? Still far to the south: Captain Beardmore's
Leopard,
fast and dangerous as her name. Tommy liked her captain's name too: dashingly close to Blackbeard. Best of all, they all agreed, though, was the king's ship: the three cloudbanks of sail—one for each mast—that marked out HMS
Seahorse
.

Tommy Boylston was not the only boy in Boston whose soul was thrilling to ships.

The following morning, Charles Paxton, impatient son of an imperious father, proved so useless in the boat they were bringing alongside the
Seahorse,
that his father felt it necessary to point out that it would do him no good to be seen as an incompetent seaman in full view of the frigate's deck.

The previous December, Charlie had disappeared, leaving his mother in hysterics for three days. It was Scipio, the family's black butler/valet/ footman/jack-of-all-trades—specially the heavy or dirty ones, as he put it—who had ferreted out the young master's whereabouts. Ever so carefully, he had coaxed the information from the network of enslaved Africans and indentured Irish who knew everything or nothing about every home, warehouse, shop, and ship in Boston, depending on a mysterious balance of loyalties, bribes, and favors owed. Scipio always made sure that he had many favors owed. Being as least as good a businessman as his master, he had seen immediately that in this instance, he could with a minimum of trouble call in a minor favor or two and transform them into a large debt of gratitude on the part of the young master's parents. Besides, he liked the young spark.

The boy had borrowed his older brother's birth year, declaring himself to be sixteen, almost seventeen, and had volunteered as a sailor on the
Seahorse
. Since he was in truth only twelve, almost thirteen, this news had produced both gratitude and an astonishingly loud wail on the part of his mother, who had screamed
Seahorse! Pirates!
and promptly fainted. In the father it had produced a mottled mix of white-faced anger and flushed pride: No son of Wentworth Paxton's would stoop to the level of a common sailor, especially on a ship Captain Paxton had once commanded. Or just as good as: he had commanded the ship (the
smaller
ship, specified Scipio with malicious glee, though only to himself) that had held the name HMS
Seahorse
twenty years before. But devil take it, the boy had salt in his veins, and daring too: was a Paxton through and through.

Later that day over a bowl of punch in an upper room in the Royal Exchange, Captain Wentworth Paxton, quondam commander of HMS
Seahorse
and now merchant of Boston, and Captain Thomas Durell, current commander of HMS
Seahorse,
came to a compromise. Charles would remain on the ship's books. Furthermore, his rating would remain “ordinary seaman,” or mariner-in-training. All the same, behind the words, his status shifted perceptibly, if not yet his duties, or the respect accorded him among the men—which now, more than ever, he would have to earn. Christened in absentia by a toast clinked over rum punch and sealed with a handshake that transferred an untold sum of gold, he became, without knowing it, one of the “young gentlemen,” aiming, with help, to reach someday for the rank of an officer.

It would have proved a day of unsullied joy if his mother, too, had not left her mark upon the agreement. Entrusting her son's future to her husband, Faith Gillam Paxton took aim at his present. Charlie would remain on the ship: but only until she shipped out. In light of his age—or rather, since it was not uncommon for eleven- and twelve-year-olds to go to sea, in light of his mother's tender (or
hysterical,
Scipio silently corrected) concern for his age—he would be granted the extremely uncommon luxury of shore leave for the duration of the
Seahorse
's next voyage to the West Indies and back. Charlie would turn thirteen, Madam Paxton demanded (and it was, after all, her Gillam family fortune upon which their prosperity depended, thought Scipio), before the famous pirate captain Roberts, terror of the Caribbean, would be granted the signal honor of so much as trying to level a blunderbuss at her baby son.

When the ship returned, Charlie would return to the ship. But not until then.

So, when
Seahorse
had pulled out of the harbor on January 6, young Charles Paxton had stood white with rage on the family wharf near the South Battery, his father's hand laid firmly on the scruff of his neck. At least, Charlie thought hotly to himself, they had had to replace him two-for-one, and not with just anybody, no sir. In his rightful place on board were two of the finest sailors in his father's ships: the Indian slave Hector Bruce, thin and strong as a whip, and an indentured man, Richard Kent.

As soon as the
Seahorse
was sighted inbound, Charles began maneuvering to sail out to meet her. Waiting for her to come in to him might take days, as much as a whole week (maybe two, said Scipio) to reach the town's wharves. It was unbearable.

This time, his father overruled his mother, the danger of pirates being judged minimal within the confines of Boston Harbor. After submitting to a smothering of kisses, Charles stepped into a boat with his father, Scipio, and a few more of his father's men. They scudded across the water, drew alongside
Seahorse,
and soon Charlie and his father were clambering aboard the frigate, Scipio following a bit more clumsily, hoisting up the boy's sea chest, full of greatcoat, warm and cool clothing, Bible, as well as the hamper of fresh food destined for the captain's cabin.

Captains Durell and Paxton exchanged smiles above the boy's head. It was refreshing—was it not?—to see a youngster near to squealing with excitement to be on board, when most of the men around him were panting for release after twenty-six days at sea.

As the captains retreated to the great cabin, Scipio ducked below with his young master's things, down and down again, hatchway after hatchway to the orlop, the lowest deck, suspended in the midst of the hold—no light or air, the bilge water mere feet below; one could hear it sloshing with every roll of the ship. The stagnant air smelled of men's sweat, tobacco juice, swamp, and cistern. Standing at the foot of the ladder, letting his eyes adjust to the dimness, he saw things gone a bit lax, no longer quite shipshape; it was, after all, the end of a cruise. He tried to map out for himself the layout of the low room that yawned into darkness on either side, the width of the ship. Even among the boys and young gentlemen who berthed down here, territory was measured in inches; to encroach in the wrong place, even by so small a bit of turf as the area of a sea chest, would transform young Charlie's initiation from rough jesting to cruelty.

He was threading across the floor, looking for the assigned gap in which to deposit the chest, when he heard a groan. He stopped and looked over his shoulder. The deck had not been left entirely open, as he had at first presumed. At the fore end of the orlop, a thin wall sliced a small space from the rest of the deck, its door propped ajar. The groan came again, from inside.

Scipio had taken no more than three steps forward when the ship rolled and the door swung open, belching forth warm, moist air whose stench made him gag. Just then, a man carrying a steaming, sloshing bowl of water poked his head through the hatchway above as he climbed down the ladder. “You there,” he said sharply. “Where do you think you're going?”

“Just delivering my young master's sea chest.”

The man laughed, but it was not a sound of pleasure. “Not in there,” he said. “Young gentlemen's berth is the palace in the other direction.”

“Yes, sir,” said Scipio, glad enough to let someone else take care of whatever was amiss in that chamber. The man, wiry and roasted to mahogany by the sun, went by him and kicked the door shut with a practiced thud. Scipio heard a latch slide home from the inside.

On the way south,
Seahorse
had rather ostentatiously draped a suspected pirate in chains and shoved him into the hold, to be transferred to a court in Barbados, which no doubt had raised him up directly to dangle from a yardarm. Perhaps Boston had traded Barbados, one prisoner for another. Poor bugger.

Scipio deposited the young master's things, and hotfooted it back out on deck, where the air was sharp and clean, and one could see the town laid out across the shore like a glistening necklace, the heavy square of the fort rather grandly called Castle William dangling at the bottom like a matron's pendant. It was this fort—or its island, Castle Island—for which the frigate was sailing. He caught the eye of Hector, his fellow among Captain Paxton's slaves, and old Dick Kent, the other sailor who had shipped in Charlie's place, and winked. But they both stared hard ahead, making no reply. Then again, the bosun's mate was watching them most particular, swinging his lash about as if he thought they might make a dash for Paxton's boat, right under his nose.
Maybe they might,
thought Scipio,
if that man keeps lashing the air with such menace
. The young master safely stowed, Captain Paxton and his servant returned to their boat and slipped back over the waves toward home.

 

The harbor bureaucracy inched its way through the fleet, clearing cargo through customs and passing crews under suspicious medical eyes: there were smallpox epidemics raging in London and Barbados. At five in the evening on April 27, as space opened up at the end of the Long Wharf, HMS
Seahorse
cast off her mooring, weighed anchor, and slipped away from Castle Island, sailing grandly into place just off the end of Boston's longest pier: a road that stretched almost half a mile into the sea, into water deep enough to dock even the largest of ships.

The officers, as usual, were granted shore leave; the men, as usual, were not. For three days, a close watch was kept on them from dawn to dusk as they ground through the heavy work of unbending sails, removing rigging that a New England gale had torn up like so much kindling, and shipping the masts for repairs. As dusk fell, though, the watch turned a blind eye to the bumboats that swarmed the ship, offering their wares for a pretty price: boxes and barrels of fresh meat, butter, cheese, fruits and vegetables, bales of new clothing and bedding, and barrels of rum—all draped with raucous women like a bright, slightly bedraggled flock of parrots.

Meanwhile, the captain concerned himself with more exciting game. Governor Shute had informed him of a pirate ship holed up in Tarpaulin Cove, in the islands southwest of Cape Cod: said to be a rich prize, loaded with a bittersweet cargo of sugar, cocoa, and slaves. The combination of damage and half-done repairs had left the
Seahorse
temporarily unseaworthy, but her commander's eagerness untarnished. After brief consultation with the governor, he hired a sloop, and on May 1 he stocked it with fifty sailors from the
Seahorse
and his equally eager second in command, Lieutenant Andrew Hamilton.

With half the ship's crew gone to seek a fight, the remainder felt justified in equalizing things by seeking action of another sort. That night, as dark fell, the watch looked the other way as shadows scuttled down the ship's cables, stifling laughter, and drifted into the taverns and brothels that crowded the wharves.